Girl, Inform Me

Because even in summer,sometimes it gets cold.

Sometimes the body cannot
maintain itself, and its
roots grow crooked and impacted.

Often we are found lost
in the middle of our
home addresses,
and we cannot fit in the
mailbox.

And sometimes the ground
is dug up and the
holes lead you into caverns
you never knew were there.

Times when you are in white rooms
with a Persian man you don't
understand, waiting
for the right answers-
your mother.

other times it's the worry
of butterfly needles
or those hazy stories
of pain-pill addiction
that scare you
when you are told to take
those kinds.

It can be silence,
more often a drone.
Like sound screens
in half-lit rooms with sofas.

Or the many nights
when you lock the car and
take a long moment to see the stars
and the possibility of space.

When you answer,
"of course you can live in Sweden,
when you're older."

When you drink two milkshakes and play
the lottery because the cards are like
tarot to you, and that lingering time
makes the air smell better.

When you plan ten confessions
in your head,
can't decide how to say the words
in a year from now.
When you coordinate your every move.
Like chess.

Sometimes you're frightened
by far-off drug cartels,
and you can't understand
12 murders so strange
and close to you somehow.

Often there is a string
with beads we are threading
and it is beautiful and dangerous
and we were it in our death,
the ferry toll to another side.

And sometimes the river Styx
is the Nile, or Jordan, or
Mississippi.